• Amanda Macias, Jeremy Bender and Skye Gould

There’s only one real way to compare military strength, and thankfully the world hasn’t had many opportunities lately.

Despite the potential powder keg in the South China Sea, standoffs in Ukraine, and proxy wars throughout the Middle East, inter-state warfare between the world’s military powers has been all but banished from the global scene (for the time being, at least).

For a simpler evaluation of military power, we turned to the Global Firepower Index, a ranking of 106 nations based on more than 50 factors including overall military budget, available manpower, and the amount of equipment each country has in its respective arsenal, as well as access to natural resources.

The index focuses on quantity, ignoring significant qualitative differences — North Korea’s 78 submarines, for instance, aren’t exactly state of the art. It also does not factor in nuclear stockpiles, which are still the ultimate trump card in geopolitics. And it doesn’t penalize landlocked nations for lack of a standing navy.

We’ve created a chart to compare the top 35 militaries according to the Global Firepower Index. The ranking was released in April (before events like the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine in August, ISIS’s blitz through Iraq, and the flare-up between Israel and Hamas) and involves a complex set of data that is subject to ongoing adjustments and corrections.